Overview
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Release Date:
21 July 1973 (Sweden)
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Tagline:
Jack Lemmon in his most important dramatic role since "The Days of Wine and Roses."
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Plot:
A businessman's professional struggles begin to conflict with his personal life over the course of two days.
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Awards:
Won Oscar.
Another 1 win
&
5 nominations
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User Comments:
The American Dream may be lost, but thankfully not Lemmon's dream performance
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Crew believed to be complete
Additional Details
Runtime:
100 min
Aspect Ratio:
1.66 : 1
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Fun Stuff
Trivia:
'Jack Lemmon' was in Europe filming
Avanti! (1972) for director
Billy Wilder when this film was edited and scored. A print was flown to show Lemmon and he invited Wilder to see it. Afterwards, Lemmon asked for Wilder's opinion. Wilder advised one change, cut out the scene in the film where Lemmon's character visits his mistress early in the story. Wilder felt it slowed down the momentum of the story. The scene was cut, the picture was released to box office success and Lemmon won a second Oscar.
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Goofs:
Continuity: Harry wipes Fred's face almost completely clean of the red body paint. In a subsequent shot, Fred's face is covered with red paint again.
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Quotes:
[
Referring to the arsonist and the hooker]
Phil Greene:
Professionals, Charlie and Margo. One starts the fires, the other one puts them out.
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Soundtrack:
I Can't Get Started
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This is a well-crafted movie, directed in 1973 by John G Avildsen in a conventional, theatrical manner, harking back to social dramas of 10 or 20 years before, but reflecting the more uncertain '70s in its unresolved ending.
Jack Lemmon delivers a brilliant, Oscar-winning performance as Harry Stoner, a middle-aged man at the end of his tether, who confuses his personal midlife crisis, and the failure of his fashion business, with what he sees as the USA's moral decline in the post-war years. Obsessed with the lost cameraderie of his active service in the war, with the baseball and jazz giants of yesteryear, and with the slain and fallen idols of the 60s (Kennedy, King, Monroe etc), he sleepwalks into his own moral abyss of an arson plot, comforting himself that he is no worse than the times in which he lives.
Lemmon's character is countered by those of Phil Greene, his business partner, convincingly played by Jack Gilford, and Meyer (William Hansen), the firm's veteran, expert cutter and refugee from Nazism. Phil does not suffer Harry's sense of disillusion, because he is too down-to- earth to have experienced the illusion in the first place; Meyer, also, despite superficial discontent with the changing times, gains strength from his skill and family life.
For me, the main theme here is the familiar one of the lost American Dream, and the film brings to mind the final lines of the seminal exploration of that theme, the Great Gatsby - "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Harry's American Dream is not of a golden future, but of a golden past; it isn't lost, it simply never existed. But, that said, in this movie thematic analysis definitely takes second place to appreciation of Lemmon's bravura performance.